I can’t believe it, but tonight after work I came home and washed, rain-x’d and waxed the Mazda CX-7. We’ve owned it since December, and this is the first time I’ve put wax on it.

I’m so ashamed, I don’t know if I have ever owned a car (besides the 240z) that ever went that long without getting waxed. Even the Turbobird got waxed and it was a huge mess.

The CX-7 was a mess, as is the 350z right now. One of the downfalls of living in Half Moon Bay, if you don’t park your cars in the garage (we don’t currently have room) they WILL be wet almost every morning.

Perhaps this weekend I can get the garage cleaned and come up with room for at least one of the cars.

Back in May I picked up a variety of parts from the MakerFaire in San Mateo. One of those parts (2x actually) was the MakerShield.

I don’t think I’ve ever soldered this much on a circuit board before. I did plenty of soldering for the Project 240z back in the day, but it was all just joining wiring together for the Megasquirt and the fuel injection system. You can see some photos of the MakerShield here.

Apparently that’s the word on the 240z. I sold it in January 2010 (or somewhere close to there) and since then it has apparently changed owners twice (possibly more).

I emailed the guy who sent me photos in October after he painted it, to see how it was, and he tells me it was sold in December

If you are the new owner, drop me a line, I’m curious how things are going.

For those of you who have known me for a while this won’t come as a surprise. I suffer from Automotive ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder),  and it is just getting worse!

oyNatalie and I are in car shopping mode, we’re looking to downsize from our 2008 F250 FX4, while we love the truck, it is just far too big for our lives in California. We recently sold our horse trailer that we had been trying to sell for a while now. Now that the trailer is gone, we are ready to part with the truck.

So we’re looking at what to get. Natalie would like a 4 door wagon, with room for a stroller (or the dogs) in the back, the baby in the back seat, and us up front. We’re thinking that we would like to find a used BMW 5 series to fill that role, though figuring out what year/mileage is something we haven’t decided yet.

One thought we are having is that perhaps it might be a good idea to trade the Z in on a 4 door car for myself as well. I test drove a 2011 Mitsubishi Evolution today, oh boy, daddy like!

I wouldn’t buy a new Evo, they are far too costly, but I would considering getting a used one and then perhaps an  older (2000-2003) 5-series for Natalie. I went to check out a couple of used 2008 Evo’s at a dealer down in San Jose today but immediately noticed that they were both modified, which totally turns me off. I don’t want to get into a modified car again, I’d rather buy something that is completely stock and if I want to modifiy it do it myself.

So we’ll see where this bout with my latest batch of AADHD takes us.

Don’t believe me that I have a problem? Here’s a list of the cars I and Natalie have owned over the past 5 years.

2003 Nissan 350z
2004 Ford F350
1988 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe
1973 Datsun 240z
1978 Datsun 280z 2+2
2005 Chevy Tahoe
2004 Chevy Corvette Z06
2005 GMC Yukon
2008 Ford F250
1995 Audi A6
2004 Nissan 350z

So it’s been a while since I’ve blogged here on Project240z.com, reason being that I sold the car quite a while ago. Back this summer I got an email from a guy telling me he was the new owner, having purchased it from the guy that I sold it to. Then, a couple weeks ago I got these in my inbox (see full post for photos):

Yes, it's true folks, the Project240z lives again! Check out the latest incarnation!

PHOTO REMOVED

So what if it is in a web based video game.

So there has been some discussion here on LeafOwner.com about the potential that dealers will try to price gouge when the Leaf comes out. I recently went to visit a local Nissan Dealer, Boardwalk Nissan in Redwood City and will admit I didn't have the best of experiences, they didn't have ANY info on the Leaf at the time, I am hoping that has changed, so I just reached out to a sales guy who contacted me due to the previous sales guy I was dealing with having left.

So here's what I emailed the guy, I'll post back to this thread later when I hear back, assuming I hear back.

NAME REMOVED,

Thanks for the phone call last night. I do have a few questions that I could use your assistance.

I have money down on a Leaf (I paid $99 back on 4/20), I realize they aren't going to be available until December, but was wondering if you had any more info about them?

Here's what I currently know. By the end of this month Nissan will be contacting me to give me more info. Sometime this summer they will send out an electrician to the house to see if installing a charger is possible or not, and to give an estimate of what that cost will be. This fall they are going to be doing some driving promotions where you can test drive a Leaf. This fall those who are interested will work with a dealer to purchase the car. Then sometime starting in December a lucky few who preordered the Leaf will get them delivered, I am hoping because we are in the bay area that I have a good shot at getting one of the first, also because I preregistered very early on.

I am looking for a dealer who is going to sell me a Leaf at or below MSRP, I am not willing to pay a markup cost for this car, and I will find a dealer that will sell me one at a good price, even if I have to tow the car home to do it. I would hope that Boardwalk Nissan can do this, but I have never purchased a car from you guys so I don't know what to expect yet.

I'm a Nissan kind of guy, I have a 350z currently (my second one) and I've owned a 240z and 280z as well. My wife and I were in at Boardwalk looking at Jettas, that was for her as a replacement for the F-250 she drives right now (for that horse trailer we talked about). The Leaf would be my commuter car if I get one.

Thanks for your help,

Chris

Have you reached out to a dealer? Had any luck?

So this won’t be the final post here on Project240z.com, but we are likely coming close to the end. This weekend the car sold, an airman from the local Air Force base in Denver came by and gave me a deposit for the car. I’m going to try to get the title cleaned up this week and hopefully get it to him this weekend if he comes up with the rest of the money.

I’ll post again when the car is gone. Thanks for all the interest in the car lately, unfortunately 99% of the interest came after I sold the car, not before, but oh well. For now check out my new toy, https://www.project350z.com/

So I really am looking to sell the 240z this time around. Though, the more time I spend on it, the less I want to sell it, so perhaps I’ll continue working on it while I wait to see if it sells, and then who knows what will happen after that. At this point in time I’m not looking to part the car out, that might change in the future, but for now I’ll keep from parting it out. Basics: Price: $1750 with all the spare parts (storage bins full), $1250 with the car as it currently sits. (add $250 to clean up title) Year:1973 Make: Datsun Model: 240z Title: None (can be acquired at additional cost) Mileage: Unknown Location: Parker, Colorado (delivery available at $1.25.mile up to 500 miles from Parker, CO)

 For any of you who follow the website regularly you'll notice that I haven't "put" the car and website up for a sale in a while. Well, it's your lucky day.

So I don’t know why I didn’t think of this a month ago, would have saved me some money on shipping, but the Corbeau A4s for the 240z are sold. John V, the guy who bought the Corvette has purchased them for use in his RX-7 that I bought and shipped to him a few weeks ago. Would have made sense to pack the seats in the car then, but I didn’t realize he was going to be interested in them, oh well.

On an unrelated note, have you checked out our sister-site, Project350z.com? You might ask, but you don’t even have a 350Z? True, but I will, at least that’s the plan, to get another one in early 2010 so I can have a car to race next year. I’ve spent a few hours over the past few sick evenings sorting through photos of the old car, which just makes me miss not having a 350Z that much more. I posted photos and got a site design together, though I don’t have much other content up there yet, it will take a few months to get it all together, hopefully just in time to get myself a new (used) ride.

Dozzle, if you read this, I still want to buy my old car back!!!!

So here we are, a new domain, a new project and a new car! This car, while a "project" isn't a project like that other car is.

Since we moved to Colorado we figured it would be a good idea if we had AWD/4wd vehicles, so we sold our 2004 F350 and traded in our 2004 GMC Envoy for a 2008 F250 FX4 last week. That put us down to a one (running) vehicle family, I couldn't take it! I'd been looking around for a while for another ride and came across this Audi not even 5 minutes from our house. It's got just under 130k miles.

So today marks a year since the 2004 Corvette Z06 left our stable. In the past year I’ve autocrossed exactly once, back in March or April of this year in St. Louis. We’ve since moved to Colorado, bought a house, and traded/sold most of our vehicles. We are in the process of trying to build up our stable again, lots of changes going on!

Yesterday I went up to Boulder Colorado and looked at and RX-7 for John, the buy who bought the Corvette. It looks like I will be heading up there next weekend and picking it up. It may require a tad bit of work to get it ready for shipping, but John is going to arrange to have a truck pick it up for the haul to DC.

I hope to start autocrossing again next year with a new ride, probably another 350z. In the mean time be sure to keep track of the progress on the 240Z at https://www.project240z.com

Today, while I was hard at work, a buddy of mine sent me a link to a car on Ebay, it was a 1984 Rabbit GTI with 517 original miles. I was looking at the car in amazement, seeing it was in St. Louis, and more so in Creve Couer, near where we used to live.

From there I clicked on another link, I'm not even sure which one, and I came across a list of cars, one that peaked my interest, a 356 speedster replica. I decided to check it out, and then I started reading more realizing it was also local to St. Louis, but get this. It is electric! I thought, oh that's cool, but then I scrolled down and started watching the video embedded into the ebay page. I'm 68 minutes into it, it's a 91 minute video.

So for a month or so I've been waiting for www.240z.net to go through the expiration process as the previous owner decided to let it expire. Well today it finally came through and guess who got it! 

Woot!

Stay tuned as https://www.240z.net gets built over the coming months. No sneak peeks right now as to what I plan to do with it. It will not just become a replacement for Project240z.com, I don't plan on this site going away.

So the Labor Day holiday weekend is coming up, and my brother is coming to town. I’m planning on putting him to work on the car. I’m not sure what the goal for the weekend is, but I do want to at least get something done on the car!

I was looking to try another body, one popped up last week on Craigslist but the dude sold it. I emailed, called, etc but the guy wouldn’t call me back, when I finally got in touch with him someone else had already purchased it, just my luck.

So as of right now I’m going to keep the current body, unless something better pops up in the mean time.

So we’ve barely been in the house three weeks and I already lost and found something! So in my last blog post I complained that I thought I left the fiberglass dashboard for the 240Z in St. Louis. Well I was wrong! Tonight while trying to get things moved around in the garage to make room for our two primary vehicles I was up on the loft moving things and came across the dashboard!

So all is well again in Project240z.com land, well, as well as it can be! I was going to drive the car around the block tonight, and park it in the third car garage, but I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen unless I wanted to take the wiring harness out of the old dash and hook up the wires. Right now the ignition wires aren’t going to anything, so that would make it kind of hard to start the car and drive it. Oh well, I moved it around a bit by hand and made room for one of our cars in the garage at least, the F350 will have to stay outside for a while longer.

Hopefully by the end of September I’ll either have a new quieter exhaust on the car, or all the paint completely stripped off, or maybe even both!

So tonight after work I got the 240Z off the trailer, both of which had been parked in the Garage since we moved to Colorado a few weeks ago. I had lined up a storage lot for the trailer and wanted to get it out of the garage. Well the 240Z wasn’t easy to start, took a good 5+ minutes of attempts before it finally started up. Later in the day I realized the MAP hose wasn’t hooked up to the Megasquirt, that would explain the difficulty in starting! whoops.

So I dropped the trailer off and came home to organize the garage a bit, moved the newly assembled shelves in place and started going through some of my boxes. After I got bored with the unpacking I decided it was a good time to put all the bulbs and fuses that I had purchased yesterday into the car. That was pretty quick and painless, but didn’t produce any fruit! I didn’t see any lights in the rear of the car at all. So what next?

I simply decided to pull the dashboard out! The whole thing, gone, removed, not going back in (likely not) along with the blower and heater core. Why might you ask? Why not. The car will hopefully be somewhat streetable, but I won’t be using most of the gauges on the car anyways. For a speedo I’ll have the G2X (GPS data logging), for RPM I’ll likely have the G2X, or even a Netbook running the Megasquirt software to show me all the appropriate date from the ECU. So why do I need the stock dash? I don’t! Though I did realize after I pulled the dash that I left the fiberlass dashboard in St. Louis, and didn’t bring it to CO. Luckily I’m going back to STL next week for work and will hopefully get it packed up and shipped back.

I’ll need to do some creative wiring, hooking up a switch for the headlights, a horn, turn signals, and even the ignition, but I think it will be cool to have all those as switchable items on a nice clean looking dashboard, not the big old clunky stock one.

Here’s a photo sans dash.

So I didn’t actually get anything physically done on the 240Z this weekend, but I did manage to get $40 worth of light bulbs and fuses for the car.

I hope to start getting them installed tomorrow night so that I can start testing out the wiring, see what all I am going to have to rewire/fix in order to make the car street legal. Fingers crossed that the stock wiring still works fine!

(My first blog post from my fresh install of Windows 7)

Two years ago today was the day that the Datsun toasted Motor #1 on it's first autocross run! Here’s a shot of that first competition run.

And then a short time later (same run) here’s my getting out to push it

Here’s what we found when we just happened to pull plug #2

And then this is what it looked like when I went to drain the oil from the motor

A few things have happened in the two years since that fateful day. A few months later I purchased a 2004 Corvette Z06 and autocrossed that for a year.

I sold the Corvette.

I got the Datsun running again with another motor, same turbo setup.

We moved to Colorado. www.going2colorado.com

In the next few weeks I hope to get more of the 240 back together, starting to work on the electrical system and such. Then during the first week of September the car goes to www.hanksvillehotrods.com for a new exhaust, maybe I can talk them into a cage too ;)

So here we are, it is now week #2 in our new home here in Colorado, and we are still loving it!

Even though the past few afternoons we’ve had some brief storms, the weather here is amazing. Here’s a result of yesterday’s storm

The hail didn’t appear to cause any damage to the cars thankfully, it was definitely interesting to see it all coming down, and then a result of the gutters. We were our furniture shopping yesterday, and while we almost bought something I quickly learned that getting a second mortgage instead of doing PMI hits your credit pretty hard. To be frank, my credit score dropped 50+ points in the past week! Oh well, I’ll just have to work harder to pay that portion of the mortgage off quickly. We were going to do no interest financing on the furniture, but I think we’ll just pay cash for it now, so hopefully by Friday we’ll have living room furniture!

We also stopped by the local mall, Park Meadows, holy cow that place is fancy! We hit the Borders to check out the computer book section, thankfully I found a copy of my book!

Tonight we figured out that a garbage disposal will not handle everything. So I had to clean out the pipes under the sink, lesson learned :) We also went skating for the first time in Colorado tonight. Natalie is not as comfortable on skates as I am, of course I’ve been skating for 18 or so years, so it' is understandable why. We went just over 7 miles tonight, if you look at the heart rate on the graphs you can see some data about the skate. We figured out it was mostly downhill the first 3.5 miles, then we turned around and boom, uphill into the wind. You can see my heart rate jumped and pretty much stayed up the whole way back.

On Sunday we got to meet the neighbors behind us, they also closed on their house on the 31st, but they’ve not fully moved in yet as they have a lease until the 24th of this month. They are a couple, around our age, no kids. I think we’re going to get a long great, we must of spend an hour or two talking to them on Sunday, it was nice. The house they purchased was one of the short sales we were bidding on, I think it worked out best for everyone right now, they got a great house, and so did we.

The rest of the weekend consisted of me driving around looking at furniture stores, electronics stores, and a VW car show! That was fun, nothing like the bug shows in California, but way better than any VW show I went to in Missouri. Here are a few photos from the show. I also got the Datsun 240z started up for a bit on Sunday. I’m hoping to get it to a muffler shop this week so I can get it quieted down and then maybe be able to run it a bit more frequently as I try to get it tuned up and drivable. Natalie spent most of the weekend at the barn watching a dressage clinic, though we did go out to dinner with a number of the people from the barn on Saturday night, that was great fun and a good time for Natalie to get to know some people.

This weekend coming up we have a lot planned. Saturday we’re going to go up to Leadville to watch the mountain bike race. A few of my fraternity brother’s are racing in it, as well as Lance Armstrong! That should be fun, we are looking forward to being up high in the mountains for a while. On Sunday I am going to head down to Colorado Springs to the SCCA Autocross down there. I’m thinking I might tow the 240z down there and see if I can’t drive it around on an empty space in the lot for a while to use the area to tune the car while driving, we’ll see if I can get everything together for that!

So that’s our update for now, hopefully everyone is doing well. We are really loving it here in Colorado, and look forward to lots of visitors this winter!

So I loaded the car up on the trailer tonight after work (well, between work actually). I’m going to take it to a buddy’s shop for a few days as we get the house packed up and everything loaded onto the moving (horse) trailer. Tuesday I’ll go pickup the car and we’ll hit the road for Colorado on Wednesday.

I even drove it up on the trailer under its own power!

Seven Days from now we’ll hit the road and head to Colorado, all of our life’s belongings with us, except the horse which should be there at the barn by the time we leave St. Louis. e’ve got a lot to do between now and then, but I do have all the utilities squared away at the new place. I got internet/TV/phone setup this morning, then called the other less important utilities such as power and gas :D

We’ve been packing up around the house, there’s still a lot left to do, but hopefully we’ll get it finished tonight and Friday. Tomorrow we’re having a little get together at Dave & Buster’s here in town as sort of a going away bash.  https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=103101229567

Friday Natalie is going to a concert and I’ll begin loading up the trailer. I hope to have an idea if we’ll be able to get everything in the trailer or not, if I can cancel the Budget truck by 10am we won’t get charged. But heck, even if we cancel after 10am, it only costs us $50. In my mind that’ll be $50 well spent, as we have the truck reserved for a Monday pickup if we do need more room for loading things. It’ll also likely tow the 240Z better than the Envoy will.

We’re planning on leaving St. Louis some time on Tuesday, driving roughly half way (Salina Kansas or further) and then finish up the rest of the drive on Thursday. I’ll likely need to go down to Cplorado Springs on Thursday to get a bank account down there for our second mortgage, they’ll give us a discount on the rate if we have an account there for them to ECH from.

So this weekend’s goal was to get the Garage packed up and ready for the move. I didn’t get much done in there yesterday, mainly just a few things assembled on the 240Z (https://www.project240z.com) today however was a whole different story. I spent 9 hours in the garage, packing, cleaning, assembling, and throwing things out. I managed to get the car running, and even drove it around the circle (check out the 240Z site later for the video).

I packed up the things in the garage that I could get into a box or container. There are a few more things to pack up, but mainly it comes down to getting the boxes out of the garage and onto the trailer next weekend. I have quite a bit of stuff to throw away or scrap. A load of metal I don’t think I want to move, so I’ll try to find a scrap yard this week where I can go and maybe even get some $$$ out of the deal?